Mirrored Poetic Performative Response: The Entrapment of Opposition and the Illusion of Democracy

• In Event: 58.057 - Reexperiencing Democracy Through the Arts as Scholarly Work in the Public Sphere

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this poetic performance response is to reflect deeply on the visceral, sensual, contemplative, and embodied performances during the 2016 meeting of AERA at the Martin Luther King, Jr. and Franklin Delano Roosevelt monuments. Reflecting deeply on bearing witnesses to suffering, we propose to create a mirrored poetic performance as our response.
The response would include the ways in which we understood the violence of oppression and the ways in which the master’s tools could never be used for liberation of the oppressed people, but could be used to keep them further oppressed, co-opted, and permanently trapped in oppositional battles, that only always favors the ruling group.

Perspectives

We integrate the sensibilities of crafting rich call and response, mirrored poetry (Cahnmann, 2003), understanding how our oppression and liberation are entangled (Anzaldúa, 2009; hooks, 1990; Minh-ha, 1989), and use mirrored poems to demonstrate such entanglement. We combine contemplative ways of knowing and being (Barbezat & Bush, 2014; Palmer, 2014; Zajonc, 2009), deep journeys within self (Anzaldúa, 2015) to understand how bearing witness could trigger generational wounds, and use our vulnerability as fertile terrain for deep insights.

Methods

The authors engage in crafting mirrored poems based on their reflections on the performances mapped onto the larger discourse of conducting socially just research within education and beyond. Within this poetic creation, the authors identify parts that mirror each other either in resonance or in opposition. This would open up spaces for contemplation and vulnerable dialogues to occur between the authors, a White and a Brown woman, whose professional relationship is a complex entanglement of power relations. The call and response mirrored poetic performance content would be emergent from this contemplative engagement to reflect on the ways in which the authors embodied their understanding of oppression, liberation, role of educational research, and the challenges and possibilities of doing such work.

Data Sources

Data sources for this mirrored poetic performance would include the performances hosted on
(http://www.joenorrisplaybuilding.ca/?page_id=1764), the authors’ engagement in contemplative writing, and vulnerable dialogues.




Results

The results would be a call and response poem that will be performed at the annual AERA meeting. We will highlight how our shared humanity and forces of oppression connect and divide us in material ways. By making ourselves vulnerable and being willing to move out of our comfort zones we would invite the audience to dialogue with us in a similar manner to imagine possibilities for a just future.

Significance

Embodied call and response integrated with vulnerability is a modeling of engaging in difficult dialogues, working with one’s own resistances, and dealing with the pain of bearing witness to suffering. With current discourses in education, where schools have become prison for Black and Brown children, higher education routinely engaging in institutional racism, Black and Brown bodies executed on the streets in the U.S. by law enforcement officers, it is critical that we evoke an empathy-triggering embodied connection so that we are inspired to create anti-oppressionist possibilities in our personal and professional spaces.

Authors

• Kakali Bhattacharya, Kansas State University

• Meaghan Cochrane, Kansas State University